The invention lies in the field of geolocating mobile terminals.
Nowadays, geolocating services are developing rapidly. In general, these services make it possible to provide information as a function of the geographical position of the user, thus making it possible to propose personalized services with high added value.
Numerous mobile services make it possible to obtain the location of a calling terminal or of a called terminal. The users of such services can at any time decide whether or not they desire to be visible and they must give their agreement to each request for their location.
Other known services enable users themselves to declare or modify their positions.
As a first example of the present state of the art, a geolocation solution for mobile telephony exists in which a first terminal that subscribes to a locating service can request a second terminal that also subscribes to that service to communicate its position.
That solution presents major drawbacks firstly in that it requires a subscription to the service, by both of the terminals, and secondly in that it requires the mobile terminal that is communicating its position to incorporate geolocating means.
Another solution in the present state of the art enables any terminal to use the short message service (SMS) to obtain the location of a terminal that has geolocating means. Unfortunately, those solutions are not reliable, and the location that is communicated can be erroneous.
The invention seeks to mitigate the drawbacks of present solutions by proposing a locating mechanism that enables any terminals to communicate location information that is reliable.